Binary Epoch Christmas Tree

So I have 15 meters of LPD8806 programmable LED lights on my fake Christmas tree. But I feel I can up the Nerd quotient even more.

Inspired by the Binary Epoch Clock kit, I added an animation to the tree that turns it into a giant unreadable binary clock. The lights are controlled by a RasPi running the BiblioPixel library, with the AllPixel making the hardware interfacing a snap.

Unix epoch time (number of seconds since 12:00am Jan 1 1970) is represented in binary notation. The strand of lights shows 32 places. Green represents a ‘one’, red, a ‘zero’. The top of the tree is the Least Significant Bit, the bottom the Most Significant Bit. There is an option to reverse the order of the bits (so that I could make the first bit be at the bottom of the tree instead). Once I clean up the code a bit, I’ll incorporate this into the BiblioPixel source code as a strip animation example.